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Share of Voice (SoV) measures how much of the answer you own. Every prompt is sent to each engine repeatedly, and each answer is scored on its own: your share is your brand set against every other brand mentioned in that same answer. Share of Voice is a share of the airtime, so how often you are named inside an answer matters. A brand the engine returns to again and again owns more of that answer than one it lists in passing, and your share reflects that. Answers where you were not mentioned at all still count, as a zero. That makes SoV a combined signal: it falls when you appear less often, and it falls when you appear alongside more competitors. To separate those two causes, zued also reports Share when present, which averages only the answers you actually appeared in.
Share when present is the one to read next to Appearance Rate, because the two separate the causes: Appearance Rate tells you how reliably you make it into the answer, Share when present tells you how dominant you are once you’re in it. If Share of Voice falls, those two say which of the two things happened. They are two views of the same underlying answers, not two factors to combine. Reading them together tells you where to act; arithmetic between them does not produce a third number worth having. Brand mentions are extracted and normalized from every AI response collected in your project. Normalization handles variations like abbreviations and alternate spellings so they all count toward the same brand. Only brands the AI recommends, compares, or discusses in its own prose are counted. Brand names that appear only inside citation links or source attributions are not counted as mentions. See Mentions, Citations & Sources for the full distinction.

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What it tells you

Both numbers measure dominance: when the AI brings you up, is the answer about you, or are you one name in a long list? SoV folds in how often that happens at all, Share when present holds it constant. The pairing with Appearance Rate is what makes it actionable. High Share when present with low Appearance Rate means you dominate the few answers you reach, so the bottleneck is getting into more answers. High Appearance Rate with low Share when present means you’re reliably present but diluted, so the lever is stronger positioning and depth. The competitive landscape plots exactly these two axes for every brand the engines mention. SoV remains a secondary metric. A high SoV with a low Alignment Score means you’re being mentioned but possibly misrepresented. Address alignment first, then use SoV to track competitive position over time.

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Per-engine breakdown

SoV is tracked per engine. Your aggregate SoV can look healthy while you’re absent from a specific engine entirely. Check per-engine breakdowns to catch engine-specific blind spots.
Since zued audits weekly, SoV is a directional indicator, not a real-time measurement. It’s reliable enough to spot trends and compare engines, but take individual data points with a grain of salt.